Thomas Hirschhorn wrote that he was not a philosopher but that he needed philosophy to live. At your work and above all, at the texts you write about it, philosophical statements are recurrent. How do you inscribe them in your work?

I don’t know. I don't know if it is due to some fragility or even because of my own incapacity that philosophy becomes my “companion”. For me art is a sensitive representation of the idea and the most faithful records of philosophy are starting points for representation, at least for me. Philosophy guides me so that my work continues to subtract any chance of reducing objects to mere objects, helping me to carry the experience of feeling and thinking as marks of the subject into artistic practice. It completes me in the sense of organizing my chaos and thus materializing it in art but this doesn't mean subordination to any ends' order. To continue as an “endless purpose” or even to be able to explain, perhaps in first place to understand how the “endless purpose” articulates with my chaos and my anarchic autoscopy of unstable clinical origin. In this confrontation I look for a new artistic praxis, to claim a permanent mastery of art. Tension and combat. And in this way I think that philosophy can favor me. For my fragility.

The experience of the sacred, the body and death as well as the meaning of the tragic, here understood as our daily basis, seem to configure the fundamental statements of your work. Is that so?

Yes, the sacred, not intending to revive religion nor to contain it within the limits of reason. Open up the simple reason to the limitlessness that produces its truth. I do not intend neither to save it nor retake it because such an attitude does not deserve more attention than any other return. The return to religion would just show — as we can easily observe - its already critical state and the dangers that it causes to the thought, the rights, the freedom and the dignity of individuals. It turns out that the supposed civilization of humanism is now in collapse or in agony. Behind the experiences of the sacred, the body and death, the fragility of my body and its fear of death, behind what they mean and behind what they hide, are the most imperative demands of my thinking today. Therefore also of my work. Where should I collect the emptiness of the disinherited opening with its absolute destination. In a different way, to continue opening the outside world in full mundane immanence. With reason's demand and need to illuminate obscurity, mine also, with sensitive representation, discipline and the strength to let the obscure project its own brightness.

Does your experience of illness and even proximity to death give an autobiographical sense, even in an indirect way, to some of the conceptual issues that you formalize in devices that summon up utopia?

Yes, no doubt. Death turns out to be a fruition for my work, perhaps an inadequate inspiration but it’s always there. A distinguished reasoning of anti eudaimonia. We walk towards death. With my constant agony feeling, guilt complex, lack of love and feeling of injustice, my work thus gains an imperishable dimension becoming a statement and expression of what I intend to be or become, as well as stop being or enable me to stop being. Always in a constant process of deconstruction and construction. It works as a practice to prepare for death, to face it. To anticipate in acting and act in anticipating. It reveals itself as a booster for my work, making the difference between the persistence of the external world and the persistence of death itself to disappear, as Schopenhauer says. But it also appears in my work as an immediate desire to die. A hedoné, because one dies. There are those who believe in the inexistence of life before death and it’s at this point when earthplaning that the thought could rise.

Through a certain poetics of destruction you call upon art, culture and history. More than a wound and beyond the symbolic materiality of the body I would say that it is a crack, a kind of original fissure that you seek to artistically formalize. How to unite what was divided? How to bind fragments? How to understand the crack as a failure?

Yes, it must be more than a wound. I agree. I turn my back on everyone again, on my fragility and vulnerability. A crack, the disruption of a wound. An upheaval caused by trauma with unfulfilled mourning. Exponentiated by an abandonment. A disposition of abandonment, unhappiness, mourning, tears and humiliation in which joy is also possible and which leads me to constantly uncover the echoes that remain of this disruption. My work blossoms on the inside, in a place outside of nature and tries to unite the divided spaces. Gradually unveiling issues that have been hidden in the artistic statements produced by me until today. I have been trying to create a new sense of preciousness, a new sense of intimacy. An intra-exogenous intimacy. From the outside out. Perhaps I define myself by the use of strategies that explore the border zones between art and my post-upheaval daily life. Trying to shape my self-conception as an author, thus creating a different absolutization of the artistic object. A kind of attempt to glue, piece by piece, the fragments of my life. To create a referent of possibility and absolute objectivity, a cure. The origin of my flaws have no return and the destruction of the wound, the crack, is an incision with no possible return. I’m not able to. It wasn’t my fault. I try to build bridges, tell the difference and allow the heterogeneity of society to manifest itself in the search for an unshareable absolutliness; in a distinct reasoning capable of moving towards the unlimited, that is, to a rule of reasoning that becomes the horizon of a common sense for us all but that no one can exhaust or define in a definitive and normative way, as the access to its dimension is disseminated in the infinite multiplicity of admissions that the group of those who participate in it represent. And that comes to my aid.

Using the concept of a fissure to critically approach your work, do you think that the disciplinary crossing that runs through your work constitutes a way, in what concerns art, of articulating or uniting what existentially you may find in the form of a mise-en-abîme? A way to support the world?

For sure, yes. Beautiful connotation. I believe that another dialogue would not be possible even though I am aware that I may incur serious incongruities in this very disciplinary crossing, that’s also suffering. But it is in that gutting, overflowing, in this liquidification of all the possibilities of anomie that I wear myself out to persist, while surviving in the world. With pessimism and repudiation. My life has been an insignificant little tragedy that will lead to a significant and inevitable death. A culmination of humiliation.

Violence often cuts through your artistic practice and seems to emerge as a way of making us confront suffering. Is it through it that you try to appeal to us to never stop seeking the “midday light”?

Yes. That’s one way we can express it. In the absence of an objective principle that distinguished my artistic work, a space is objectively opened for the appearance of a subject who doesn’t distinguish anything at all. The violence. It represents a debate, which sometimes has limitations not always surpassable. With a fruition or accompaniment that becomes difficult, rise the several unavailabilities with overwhelming praxis and devastating restrictions. The singularization of my choices due to individual determinations in the face of this fragility of mine that causes the collapse of dialogue, artistic speech and, consequently, critical discernment, even among people who share the same space. All suspended in apnea. Not rarefying the spaces for reflection in communities of experiences, sensitivities, avoiding that the crowd of which we are part becomes atomized, affronted, that progressively avoids wandering in a lotophagous state, consisting of people who are on their own, increasingly and consciously and forcibly unaccompanied.

In your work, as the project dimension is what seems to be the engine full of meaning, how do the materials and supports you used enhance your personal artistic program in the work “KNIFE AND WOUND”?

Yes, the project is never dissociated from the choice of materials, obviously. But the relevance of their choice is always undifferentiated. My choice of materials is not doxa, it is a paradox. The materials and supports I choose are always anti-opinionated. I believe that my work does not allow itself to be captured by inter-digmatic and paradigmatic axes. It is a semiotic matter, composed of various kinds, ways, signs and it is with this significant mass that I manage to create the intended and concise type of images or objects or exhibition interest. My work aims to be similar with dissimilar means. These dissimilar means that always have an affectionate and perceptual dimension that help us as a reflex, to see things and not to discuss them, anything through which we understand better through them, or not. Take it or leave it. They always promote a critical dimension, never purely argumentative.

Today and with a more detached perception, do you think that your way through the mythical school in Düsseldorf had consequences, in some way, in the work that you later developed?

It was one of the worst moments of my life. I was very sick and for a year and a half I didn't leave my room. Everything was in suspension but something remained in spite of everything. It led me to a new reality, to a void that belongs to everyone and nobody. It had consequences in my work, yes. For the two contexts I lived in. It made me rethink the difference between art and life. Above all, it enabled me to persist, to insist that the absence stays in time in order to exceed any end. It made me think all at once about my life and work as a part and as a whole; more precisely, these two contexts were the insistence of a rest as a whole. My life and work did not come to transport nothing but the training force itself that was absent from the forms. The whole was always left open or prevented from totaling. It made me persist regarding so many undifferentiations. One of the worst moments of my life.

Do you want to better explain the relationship between art and life that you talk about? And the void that you refer to can be understood as a vital driving force for the work that you later developed? Is there a before and after of your time in Dusseldorf, shall we say? Or on the contrary, what already existed was intensified?

It is impossible to separate the ethos and pathos from the relationship I have with art. My finitude as a being empties into desire for (in) finitude of my work, the work of art. Art results in a legitimate penetration and apprehension of meaning. Its multiplicity is not linked to me but to the approaches according to which it is manifested in sense and through it. The approaches to art go beyond me as an individual, mobilizing parts or aspects of various fields, even of all without claiming a chapter place, synthesis or assumption. That is important. Art allows multiple access to meaning, it raises and makes possible the denial of misery, abjection, subjection, everything that closes, fills, unifies or crushes. Art gives me the possibility to live without wanting to give it meaning or truth. Art shapes and structures my emptiness. At the core of this emptiness, art resists simply because it is art. It means that if there is no persistence it is not done or will not be done with a supposed art or with an introduction to art, however well-intentioned it may be, in art. The void represents nothing else but the character given to persistence. A void originated by an emotional and social gap or dehiscence that can be distinguished with consistency and sharing, because it has the capacity to disconnect me from the immeasurable. At Kunstakademie this void was emphasized. This parti pris of the anguish that creates persistence was upheaved. My confusion and infusion were even more intensified. All the denouncing, lying and humiliation. Not failing to show an obvious before and after Akademie, to try and make the possibilities in art unobstructed but in the same direction of what I was already being and living. In a life context already on the verge of death. It helped me to think beyond the anonymous and impersonal self. It helped me to think about the immanence of art itself. Looking forward, in which its immanence opposes chaos, supporting this way in a plan of consistency. Persisting is always a fight against chaos, persisting in multiplicities to get out and survive chaos. We all need a plan of immanence, we live in a chaotic world that presents itself as preventing persistence. It helped me to structure a new mindset, as a critical selection of data, restoring meaning to the world and to our action. We all stopped believing. We need faith, not in another world, but in this world, which idiots are also part of.

Yes, the sacred, not intending to revive religion nor to contain it within the limits of reason. Open up the simple reason to the limitlessness that produces its truth. I do not intend neither to save it nor retake it because such an attitude does not deserve more attention than any other return. The return to religion would just show — as we can easily observe - its already critical state and the dangers that it causes to the thought, the rights, the freedom and the dignity of individuals. It turns out that the supposed civilization of humanism is now in collapse or in agony. Behind the experiences of the sacred, the body and death, the fragility of my body and its fear of death, behind what they mean and behind what they hide, are the most imperative demands of my thinking today. Therefore also of my work. Where should I collect the emptiness of the disinherited opening with its absolute destination. In a different way, to continue opening the outside world in full mundane immanence. With reason's demand and need to illuminate obscurity, mine also, with sensitive representation, discipline and the strength to let the obscure project its own brightness.